Dedicated to the preservation of our planet's architectural treasures, the World Monuments Watch was established in 1996 to aid in the rescue of endangered cultural sites. Breathtaking full-color photographs, many newly commissioned, portray the most important sites on the Watch's list between 1996 and 2000 - including such marvels as the Angkor Archaeological District in Cambodia, Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, ancient Pompeii, and many others around the globe. Spanning Baroque palace gardens in Vienna to an ancient city in the central Asian desert, the book includes brief discussions of each site.

The only guide that features art from tribes and cultural groups from all around the world, not just one region, Tribal Art features historical, cultural, and price guide information on the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas and is the definitive collector's guide for tribal art enthusiasts.

In the tradition of our best-selling Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents (120,000 copies in print), here are outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world's greatest artists, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts.

Recounts the activities of John Drewe, who manipulated struggling artist John Myatt and other unwitting accomplices to become prolific art forgers whose works Drewe successfully passed off as legitimate pieces.

Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into “something rich and strange.

With its lavish color illustrations - the paintings and sculptures are all reproduced in full color - and numerous documentary pictures of the artists themselves, Women Artists: An Illustrated History provides an unprecedented wealth of visual material on the subject. This updated third edition adds several new international artists - including Mona Hatoum, Kiki Smith, Carne May Weems, and Rachel Whiteread - to bring the content up to the minute. Nancy G. Heller's text offers a lively overview of the obstacles that women encountered - restricted access to education and apprenticeship, social pressures to marry and mother, limited opportunities to travel and exhibit - but she most emphasizes the ingenious ways that generations of women artists circumvented these obstacles to establish themselves as well-respected professionals.

This work condenses Racinet's classic six-volume set, History of World Costume (1876-1888), and translates it into English for the first time. Its text and 2,000 illustrations, most in full color, cover worldwide costumes from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century Europe--royalty, the working class, soldiers, and the poor.

Beautifully illustrated with reproductions from the remarkable stained glass collection at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Stained Glass addresses the making of a stained glass window, its iconography and architectural context, the patrons and collectors, and the challenges of restoration and display. The selected works include examples from Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Subject matter ranges from monumental religious scenes for Gothic churches to lively heraldic panels made for houses and other secular settings. Integrating comparisons to works of art in other media, such as manuscripts, drawings, and panel paintings, this book encourages the general reader to see stained glass as an element of a broad artistic production.

In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid picture of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age.

In this current era of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) special effects, the serious film student will often overlook the history of earlier animation techniques. This lavishly illustrated book chronicles the oft-forgotten work of the master of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen.

New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman's transcendent series The Sandman is often hailed as the definitive Vertigo title and one of the finest achievements in graphic storytelling. Gaiman created an unforgettable tale of the forces that exist beyond life and death by weaving ancient mythology, folklore and fairy tales with his own distinct narrative vision.
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From ancient Germany's "Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel" to James Turrell's 1995 photograph "Roden Crater," chronologically presents one thousand examples of art from different countries, cultures, and civilizations and discusses what makes each piece both unique and representative.

The Art Atlas is the first work to present the art of the entire world from ancient to modern times through extensive use of specially commissioned maps. Covering painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as other arts and artifacts, the volume provides an entirely new vision of the history of the world’s art by showing how physical and political geography has shaped its developments.

The Greek architectural orders--Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian--lie at the heart of the classical traditions of building, and yet satisfying accounts for their origins have proved elusive. In contrast with conventional theories that would see the orders originating over the course of a long evolution, this book stresses the suddenness of the phenomenon and its dependence on historical context, human agency, and artistic inspiration. Casting new light on a subject that has preoccupied architects since the Renaissance, Mark Wilson Jones shows how construction, influence, appearance, and meaning found expression in complex and multifaceted designs. New emphasis is placed on the relationship between the orders and the temples of worship that they were created to adorn. Temples were exquisitely made offerings to the divinity, and they also contained valuable offerings. In revealing affinities between certain offerings and the orders, the author explains how these gave architectural expression to sensibilities of intense social and religious significance

From the mysterious Great Pyramid of Egypt and Turkey's exquisite Hagia Sofia, to the splendid palace at Versailles and Frank Lloyd Wright's graceful Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, Great Buildings explores the world's most stunning buildings and other iconic architectural creations in fabulous visual tours. The history of each building is explained, from the commissioning to how they were built, and is supplemented with 3-D cutaway artworks and pullouts of the exterior, as well as key details of the interior. With features on prominent architects, construction and style, Great Buildings is a comprehensive and excellent introduction to architecture's greatest achievements.

Spanning six centuries of global design, this far-reaching survey is the first to offer an account of the vast history of decorative arts and design produced in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Islamic world, from 1400 to the present.

The great myths of the world create meaning out of the fundamental events of human existence: birth, death, conflict, loss, reconciliation, the cycle of the seasons. They speak to us of life itself in voices still intelligible, yet compellingly strange and distant. World Mythology offers readers an authoritative and wide-ranging guide to these enduring mythological traditions, combining the pure narrative of the myths themselves with the background necessary for more complete understanding.

Full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of peer-selected publications covering world art, now including coverage of Latin American, Canadian, Asian and other non-Western art, new artists, contemporary art, exhibition reviews, and feminist criticism.

Contains full text from more than 750 history reference books and encyclopedias, and cover-to-cover full text from nearly 60 history magazines. Also contains 58,000 historical documents; 43,000 biographies of historical figures; more than 12,000 historical photos and maps; and 87 hours of historical film and video.

Contains the entire text of The Dictionary of Art (34 volumes, covering all aspects of the visual arts of every civilization from prehistory to the 1990s) with annual additions of new material and updates to the text, plus extensive image links.

This remarkable six-part series analyzes the history of painting technique in a way that is at once both highly focused in approach and encyclopedic in content. Each video critically examines an individual aspect of the painting process using well-known masterpieces as examples. The sheer abundance of high-quality art images makes the series an excellent reference work—and special effects and scientific processes such as infrared reflectography enable viewers to see for themselves how some of the world’s greatest paintings were made.

This six-part series explores major ideas, themes, and motifs that have driven the development of Western art. Renowned examples of still life, portraiture, and landscape painting are showcased, along with the manipulation of chiaroscuro, the narrative power of pictures, the ancient connection between artist and model, and the use of scientific analysis to study a painting’s hidden past.

Historian Michael Wood leads a nine-part tour through 2,500 years of Western painting, sculpture, and architecture, filmed at over 150 locations in eight countries and featuring commentary by historians and scholars.